Infrastructure update - what have we done lately, and what's coming up next?

Here's a quick update on some changes we've made in the last couple of months, and what we're working on for the next couple of months.

First, we'll be offline from some time on April 27 through April 29 for data center maintenance. I will post a broadcast message across the site with the expected downtime when I have the confirmed times available.

Second, we'll be taking the old Java.net wiki offline over that weekend. The old wiki has been read-only for over a year now, and much of the content has been broken up and made available in individual projects over the last year. If you have pages you'd like to keep, please file a request with the URLs of the pages you want in the site bug tracker[2]. We will send a copy of the raw file and and also one converted to MediaWiki format that can be uploaded into a project wiki on the current site.

So what else have we done lately?

- Purged approximately 3000 old, never used mailing lists that were migrated from our old site. This freed up some space to allow SYMPA to perform better for everyone. We're still going to need to upgrade soon, but this bought us some time. If you have any projects with unused lists, or lists that are only gathering spam, please take a minute to delete them, it will help.

- Tweaked the WYSIWYG editor in the forums, and made some other bug fixes, taking care of issues where users were losing content by following links to help, adding a code tag, etc.

- Changed how we are managing communities as a whole. This is part of a longterm overhaul, but the first step was changing from our historic model where a project could only be a member of one community and that was determined by parent-child relationships in the infrastructure. Now we're handling this via association tags, which means projects can be members of multiple communities. I'm currently going through the back catalog and updating project metadata to support this switch. This should improve search and general visibility for active projects.

So what's next?

- This fall we'll be moving the forge half of the site to a new datacenter, which will include a hardware upgrade, and we'll also be doing performance enhancements where we can, and upgrading our forge tools to the latest versions. Engineering work and QA has started on this.

- After the move we'll be working on replacing or upgrading SYMPA with something better suited to our needs. What we have now just can't handle our existing traffic as it should.

- Next we'll be looking at finally shutting down Kenai.com and merging active projects from there into Java.net. Tonya and I are slowly going through the projects there and attempting to purge junk and determine how big that migration problem really is. If you have a project there you'll start to see notes from us over the next few months.

- On the CMS side of the site we'll be adding groups functionality to the site, starting with JUGs.

- We're also looking at ways to deliver statistics on projects (right now we have none), we'll be improving search on the site, and also adding API so users can create their own project management tools.